“You, too, Mr. Regent,” she said.
There was something else Zoe wanted to say, but she couldn’t get it out. Regent turned away. He’d be gone in an instant.
“Will I get to tell X what his father is like?” said Zoe. “Will I get to bring X to meet him?”
The next sentence was the hardest to speak aloud. The words seemed to be sewn inside her.
“Will I ever see X again?”
“He believes you will,” said Regent. “I am not so certain. I see no advantage in lying to you.”
“Will you tell him I love him?” said Zoe. “Will you tell him that I’m smitten, and he’s the smiter?”
“I shall use those very words,” said Regent.
A thought seemed to occur to him. He glanced around, and his eyes fell on a steep white slope where a neighboring mountain rose above them.
“I shall leave you with a gift,” Regent said. “Perhaps it will give you solace.”
He lifted his palm toward the cliff face, and the snow began to glow. A movie played in the wilderness.
The movie was of X.
Zoe saw him as he was that very instant. He was resting against a rock wall in a tunnel, his face in his hands. Zoe pleaded silently for him to uncover his face, so she could see his eyes.
Val crunched toward her through the snow, shouting, “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Why are you making me endanger my beauty?!”
Zoe didn’t answer.
Up on the snowy screen, X finally lifted his head, and seemed to look right at her. Zoe went still—her breath, her blood, everything.
She would find X’s father. And she’d see X again—she had no idea how, but she was going to. It didn’t matter that even Regent doubted it.
Val trekked down to Zoe, and plopped into the snow beside her.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
Zoe gestured toward the cliff.
“X,” she said.
“There’s nothing up there but snow,” said Val. “You’re losing it. How long have you been out here?”
Zoe realized then what Regent had done.
X was only for her.
Dallas had gone to the bottom of the mountain to finally ask Mingyu out. Zoe and Val rode a chairlift down in the dark. Just the underside of the moon was lit. It dimmed and brightened, as clouds passed in front of it. Zoe bounced her knee impatiently, as if it would make the lift go faster. She didn’t tell Val about X’s father. She wasn’t ready. When they got off the chair, she raced for the parking lot, where she knew she could get a signal. The slush was ankle-deep, and splattered her as she ran.
Zoe could only get the call to go through if she stood on the bumper of Val’s Jeep. She pulled off her gloves, and tried typing “Timothy Ward Montana.” Her nerves were a mess. She misspelled the name twice. On the third try, she got 459,000,000 results, most of which weren’t even close, like Tim Montana of Ward, Florida. Zoe had to stop herself from flinging the phone.
But wait. There was an article, from the Flathead Beacon, about a wilderness biologist in Glacier National Park. The headline was “A Life Apart.” The photo showed a fiftyish man in his living room, a sculpture of a grizzly at his side. Zoe recognized his shy smile from X.
Holy crap. There he was.
She heard footsteps, and looked up to see Val and Dallas coming across the lot.
“What’d she say?” she shouted. “WHAT DID MINGYU SAY?”
Dallas didn’t answer. It couldn’t be good.
Zoe jumped down from the bumper, and walked toward them.
“Tell me,” she said.
They stood in the cold lot, wisps of vapor slipping out of their mouths, like they were smoking pipes.
“She said maybe,” Dallas told her. “I didn’t even know that was an option, but it’s cool. I’m cool.”
“Tell her about the lists,” said Val.
“She wants a list of my five favorite books, albums, and TV shows—before she makes a decision,” said Dallas. “It’s like, I don’t know, an application process? She was pretty hard-ass about it. I said, ‘Come on, I gave you a Pop-Tart!’ And she goes, ‘I can’t be bought with a Pop-Tart!’ So I said, ‘What about a Goth-Tart?’ And she goes, ‘Okay, maybe with a Goth-Tart.’ That’s good banter, right?”
“Totally solid,” said Zoe.
She told them about Regent, about the sign that said Find Something Else to Do with Your Life, about the name that Regent had written on the back of it.
Their faces fell. The whole outdoors seemed to get chillier. Zoe looked at her phone. She recognized the sculpture of the grizzly now, too. It was one of Rufus’s chain-saw things. It had to be.
“I bet this guy knows Rufus,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be amazing? What are the chances of that?”
“They’re actually pretty good,” Val said coldly. “There are, like, nine people in Montana.”
Zoe knew Val was just worried about her.
“Let’s go find this guy,” she said.
“Slow down, dawg,” said Dallas.
Zoe thought of the tattoo on Dallas’s shoulder.
“Whatever happened to Never don’t stop!?” she said.
“Come on, I was sixteen when I got that,” he said. “Now I know there are consequences to stuff. You can’t just go around never-don’t-stopping all the time.”
“I’m with Dallas,” said Val. “You need to think this through.”
“I have,” said Zoe. “Now, I just need a ride.”
She was sure they’d come around. She stepped back up on the bumper and texted her mom.
Gonna be later than I thought. 1 a.m. at least. Cool? Cool.
Her mother wrote back before Zoe could even get her phone into her pocket: Wait what no! UNCOOL. This is NOT how we do things.
How do we do things?? I’ll send you a selfie to show you I’m OK and not high on meth. (Did you smoke all our meth, btw?) The flash on the camera lit up the parking lot.
“Val can drop me off, and you two can go,” said Dallas. “But I’m not into it. I’m sorry, Zoe. Old Dallas would have gone. But old Dallas was waiting around for you.”
“I get it,” said Zoe. “I’m happy about you and Mingyu. It’s gonna happen. I know it is.”
Her phone buzzed. It was her mother again.
We do things w/ INTENTIONALITY & FORETHOUGHT, Zo. This pic only tells me u r beautiful, which I already knew. I want u back here in 20 minutes.
No, mom. Sorry
Zoe looked at Val: “Please go to Glacier with me? I’m using my sweetest voice.”
Another text from her mother: NO? SORRY? Why are u behaving like this, Zo? Are u dehydrated? NO MORE BAD DECISIONS. Is Val with u? Val knows better than this.
Crap. Now the phone was ringing, too.
Wait, mom!! Zoe texted. Somebody’s calling me.
It was … Val.
“Oh my god, I’ve told you not to call me when I’m standing right here,” said Zoe.
“Hang on a sec,” said Val. “I’m on the phone.”
“I’m not gonna answer,” said Zoe. “Why are you so weird?”
“Huh, they’re not answering,” said Val. “I’ll leave a message.”
Val tilted her head back and forth in a tick-tock sort of way while waiting for the beep, then left the following message: “I’ll take you to Glacier because you’ve emotionally manipulated me, but just to be clear: you’re making a mistake, and this whole thing sucks ass.”
Zoe went to hug her. Val wouldn’t allow it.
When they got to Dallas’s house, he told them to wait a minute. He opened the trunk of his 4Runner, in which lay a paradise of caving gear, and pulled out two orange backpacks. He gave one to Zoe and the other to Val.
“For Glacier,” he said. “Just if you need it.”
When Zoe asked what was in them, he said, “Survival shit.”
She turned her pack around.
“I see,” she said.
On the front of the backpack, in thick block letters, Dallas had written, SURVIVAL SH*T. On the front of Val’s, he’d written, MORE SURVIVAL SH*T. The asterisks made Zoe smile. Dallas always worried about offending grown-ups.
“I need them back,” he said. “I made them for me and Mingyu. I got ahead of myself, I guess.”